Legal News

The Seattle Times has reported that Steven Avery’s defense counsel and attorneys for the State have filed an agreement in the Court of Appeals to begin independent scientific testing of several pieces of physical evidence in the case. Mr. Avery was convicted of the 2005 rape homicide of a newspaper photographer, and the story of...

Four women’s legal nightmare has come to an end. They have been declared innocent of the child sex abuse crimes for which they served many years in prison. Aimée Sutton wrote of their cases here in a guest post in October. A documentary movie [http://www.southwestofsalem.com/] helped them draw public support. All four are lesbians. Their...

The disciplinary actions taken against Washington State University football player Robert Barber by the university have some critics wondering whether students accused of assault are receiving fair and adequate process of their cases. Fifth-year senior Robert Barber, a defensive tackle for WSU’s football team, was expelled (one class short of graduation) by the university after...

by Aimée Sutton People convicted of sex offenses get used to living their lives with many restrictions. They usually serve long prison sentences or live under the tight control of probation officers. But even when prison ends and probation supervision eases, they must live as registered sex offenders. Since the mid-1990s all states have required...

Basic to the American criminal justice system is the presumption that criminal defendants are innocent. Also fundamental is that a defendant must be acquitted unless guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. These rules aim to protect innocent defendants from conviction even at the price of occasionally letting a guilty defendant go free. Since lawmakers’...

In 2012 Louisiana became the first state to require by law that sex offenders openly post their status as such on any social media profile, such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. This law may be an unconstitutional violation of sex offenders’ First Amendment right to free speech. The law mandates that a sex offender or...

Last year New York State enacted one of the most aggressive pieces of anti-sexual assault legislation in the nation. The law aims to reduce instances of sexual assault on New York’s university campuses by requiring schools to “adopt a set of comprehensive procedures and guidelines, including a uniform definition of affirmative consent, a statewide amnesty...

The medical science supporting so called “shaken baby syndrome” (SBS) may be much weaker than most American physicians think. A recent article by writer Sue Luttner summarizes the findings of a 2016 Swedish report evaluating the strength of the science behind claims that violent shaking causes infant brain damage. The report comes from the Swedish...

by Aimée Sutton Parents have their hands full with all the social media and electronic perils facing their adolescent children these days. One set of parents in Iowa decided that that they were better positioned than the county prosecutor to help their daughter navigate the complexities of these issues, and so they filed suit in...

by Alexei Garick Most sexual assault allegations arise from encounters between acquaintances. Rape by a stranger is particularly disquieting, and thus ideal for television and movie depiction, but it is rare. It is often my job as an attorney defending persons accused of sexual assault to unpack what went wrong in a very private affair....